Contact centers typically employ a number of agents to handle calls throughout a scheduling period. Depending on the purpose of the contact center, agents may be staffed twenty four hours a day, seven days a week (“24/7”), or a portion thereof. A common staffing arrangement involves scheduling a group of agents during each weekday with reduced staff working on the weekend. Thus, the contact center may have one or two day shifts during the week and a single shift on the weekend. Frequently, the weekend shift is staffed by rotating subset of the agents that work during the week.
There are different types of shifts and arrangements for scheduling agents. This could include a day shift, evening shift, night shift, and weekend shift. There may be some agents that prefer evening or weekend shifts and scheduling these agents for such times may avoid hardship for other agents. However, agents often prefer working a day shift, and may find it less desirable to work evening, night or weekend shifts. Given a set of scheduling requirements, accommodating the preferences of all the agents in a contact center can be challenging and in many cases, it is simply not possible to appease the desires of all the agents. Thus, scheduling a group of agents to meet the required operational requirements frequently involves a compromise among the agents and administrators. Typically, agents will agree to periodically work the undesirable work schedules so long as no one agent, or set of agents, is unfairly burdened.
Establishing an initial schedule of rotating shifts to cover the operational requirements of the contact center can be a challenge by itself, but it is further complicated by changes that may be occur after a recurring schedule is established. It can be expected that agents may become sick, fail to show up for work during their scheduled shift, require time off for doctor's appointments or family-related functions, take scheduled vacations, etc. Additionally, agents may quit or may be terminated, and new agents may be hired as replacements. Each of these events may disturb an established schedule and changes have to be equitably handled by the contact center administrator.
Further, assignment of agents to such schedules should be done easily and changes should involve minimal time by the administrator. It is preferred to avoid having the administrator manually re-enter each agent's information or rebuild an entirely new schedule each time a single change is made to a schedule involving a set of agents.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide an automated system for easy and equitable distribution of work schedules that also accommodates various types of exceptions and changes thereto. The automated system should easily accommodate establishing and changing a schedule, all the while ensuring that that schedule changes are performed equitably among the various agents. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure herein is presented.